Article in today's paper about youth and adult transitions.

I did everything I usually do today, although my today is from 4 PM to about 6 PM later today. I will volunteer today starting in about 1 hour. I have also worked for about an hour marking statistics assignments. I am more than half way done with this work which is due back on Tuesday. I need to volunteer on Monday too with my PA system so should get this marking done today if possible. This is part of my teaching assistant duties.

I have read some of my own studies earlier today. This includes studies in law, informatics, and also social research. I also helped a fellow academic with some statistical problems and although I took the role of statistical consultant in this work I believe it was not all that successful. There is a book review of a pop statistics book in today's Sunday newspaper by journalist Jason Chow who is in Toronto. The book is Rosenthal, Jefferey S. Struck By Lightning: The Curious World of Possibilities (Toronto: HarperColins, 2005). I was struck by the term Markov Chains again and Monte Carlo another term I seem to have some understanding of, and these combined are Rosenthal's specialty.

I listened to some podcasts, which are in this case just spoken radio like entertainment. But the difference is that they are digital and thus can seemingly be saved for later use or reference. I have also listened to two or three albums of music. I have two reasons to listen to more music. One I need to put more relaxation into my schedule because even reading is work for me. And two I am taking up my music career a bit more including giving a free lesson today at about midnight, in blues playing and also major and minor scales on the guitar. In my studies today and in the podcast I was learning about PDA's as well and I mention this here because the applications I installed and tested on my Palm PDA today were artistic tools. One is called Fretboard and is very useful and not bad as an interface for what it does. It is able to show the fretboard positioning for chords, scales, and notes for a variety of fretted instruments and this is really its power is that it has many fretted instruments I have never played on nor have played with players of these instruments. Another music tool for the palm PDA was the software Tuning Fork which played throught the speaker on the palm perfect A notes at 440. I tried it to play 880 which it did but then the palm froze and needed to be soft reset.

The other PDA art tool was Q draw perhaps more in line with my school training in arts and I used it to draw a floor plan of our apartment. I was quicker and did a better drawing, than I have with other softwares like Illustrator and Photoshop. The reason perhaps is because doing this on the palm was more like holding a sketch pad with a pen instead of a mouse. Yet the various drawing tools are similar to other computer drawing programs where there are tools such as shapes and fill and of course text my all time favorite tool as I was trained to techincal drawing and map making. These types of drawings are incomplete without text labels.

I read the paper with interest today which is unusual for a Sunday paper. The cover of one section had a photo of a sister union member. The article "On Hold: Coming of Age in Ottawa is a Road to Nowhere For Many Worried Twentysomethings" by Pauline Tam Ottawa Citizen, October 16, 2005 C3-C6. It is about concepts like emerging adulthood and arrested adulthood. There are some pretty simplistic value statements defining adulthood and relating the values of work, but the economic arguments I thought might be missing that explain the situation, like lower wage trends in the past thirty years, were included in the article. I have experienced what this article is about both in my work and my school life. It also includes the family as a topic in this article and the plea for government and business policy for part timers and this hits one of my road blocks square on the head. This pieces analysis and my reading of it remind me to see the parallel developments approach to analysing problems. The social can not be divorced from the economic and, in fact, the best perspectives are interdiciplinary perspectives. This article also had some critiques of teaching and I seem to be taking on the resonsibility for my teaching and hoping to improve it.

Speaking of teaching I need to prepare some statistics labs for Monday. I also have about three data mining conference reports out from the library from Friday night. I should take some time now and read some of these articles before going out to volunteer.